Views as a Web Widget has the potential to revolutionize the Internet, now that I think about it. Taking a hint from Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion in The Future is Web Services, Not Web Sites, we are entering a time where creating an API for embedding content within another site is becoming a standard way of sharing information.
The leading players on the web all see the train coming. They are wisely creating APIs and turning themselves into plug-and-play services, not just big destinations. YouTube is just the latest to do so today. Amazon has S3. Google has OpenSocial and an extensive library of APIs. As does Microsoft. Facebook is allowing its applications to live outside the site. Twitter is an API first and (eventually) a business model second. Finally, the booming widget economy shows the promise of small content that can go anywhere.
The Views as a Web Widget project is being proposed for Google's 2008 Summer of Code. This project will allow an administrator to turn any view into a widget.
As I have experience with this, having implemented Views Slideshow (any view into a slideshow), Embedded Media Field (embedding external "widgets" from YouTube, Flickr, etc.), and a widget for Maplight, and am interested in being a mentor this year, I plan to offer to mentor that project, along with Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg.
Tim Berners-Lee spoke last week on the topic, saying that the semantic web will supersede the monolithic giants of Facebook and Google. As Dries recently indicated at his State of Drupal address in Boston, the Drupal of the future will be semantic web.
The Drupal of the Future will explode your site into a million pieces. And if your site can handle that, it will thrive in that multifaceted environment.
I am trying to understand the demo on: http://drupalhub.org/videos . Does the plugin embedded media field come with that?
I mean instead of 1 Video or few on the page it goes in slideshow fashion.
yeah it would be great if it could work with firefox. Still very nice though.
The media player looks great. Thanks for developing it.
Written for Drupal 6, this book is a comprehensive overview of integrating multimedia into your Drupal-powered web site. With hands-on examples and tutorials, the book is written for site developers, themers, and administrators. The book makes no assumptions about your skill level, although one should probably already have an understanding of Drupal and how to set up and configure a basic site. The book will guide you through its topics, gently moving the reader from basic concepts such as module set-up, to intermediate techniques such as creating views, to advanced methods such as writing jQuery and custom modules.
This is a great book. I have bought it myself and it has taught me a lot.
Drupal is the best open source framework.
Here is a list of the Drupal benefits:
Easy to install - Drupal installation described here;
Easy to use - no programming knowledge needed! Read through this tutorial to learn the basics of Drupal. Spend 2 hours administering your site. After that you will feel very familiar with Drupal;
Lots of features, such as custom search engine friendly URLs(SEF), categories, search function;
Lots of modules to add even more functionality to your site;
Flexibility - you can easily turn your drupal installation into a forum, faq, blog, wiki and many other types of web sites;
Free to use, open source. You can freely install drupal and you can modify the source code to fit your needs, if you want;
Lots of users & community - easy to find solutions to your problems. The large community guarantees that Drupal will have a bright future;